Touring Yan’an Today
In today’s Yan’an, red tourism is a strategy that combines the development of domestic tourism as part of strengthening the national economy with pedagogical intentions. Recognizing that brick-and-mortar museums are insufficient for successful ideological education (Denton, 2014, p.
215), the new sites of red tourism in contemporary China try to instill a feeling of nostalgia that in the post-Mao-era market economy is, more often than not, commodified (for an overview on the growing number of red sites, see Matten and Kunze, 2020). As Denton points out, this nostalgia does not necessarily result in the social critique that could emerge from the visible contradiction between pre-reformist egalitarian ideals and today’s rampant corruption and class division, which is so at odds with the communist utopia that had been propagated in the sacred cradle of revolution. Red tourism in Yan’an combines the need for propaganda with tourist amusement by commemorating the contribution of party members to the success of China’s so-called liberation in 1949. Though the correct ideological training of tourist guides is considered crucial in red tourism, as Han (2017) argues, an overly formalized and unified explanation of the past that adheres closely to the dry narrative of party historiography would hardly attract visitors, and neither would continuous references to texts in the Maoist canon (including the Yan’an Talks) prove to be an effective measure. The guides had to be equipped with different means of selling the message (and of selling their service, as their income is based on the number of tours booked).5 Responding to consumer demand, local tourist management authorities diversified their ways of disseminating the message, ranging from material testimonies and performances to opportunities for reliving past experiences.A case in point is Mao Zedong’s vegetable garden (Figure 7.2).
When I visited Yangjialing in the summer of 2018, the guides inevitably pointed to a garden next to Mao’s cave that is said to have been tilled by the chairman himself. This was by no means a random comment, as it was also included in the audio guides that underlined his frugal attitude and his active participation in the Great Production Campaign. In the 1940s—a time of material scarcity—this campaign called for all social classes to partake in economic production and follow the policy of “self-reliance brings forth sufficient clothing and ample food” (zili gengsheng, fengyi zushi B⅛M⅛, Φ∙⅛^"⅛, see Watson, 1980, p. 49).This famous slogan is not simply a record of the Maoist past but is still meaningful for today’s society, as Han Yuanjun points out in his 2017 book On the Development of Red Tourism in the Era of Mass Tourism. For him, the Yan’an spirit of self-reliance nowadays plays a central role in the plan of reaching “a comprehensive moderately prosperous society” (quanmian shixian xiaokang shehui ^W^¾ΦM⅛⅛) by 2020, as declared at the 18th National Congress of the CCP in 2012 (Han, 2017, p. 32). The supposed identity of the Maoist ideal and contemporary policy is communicated to
Figure 7.2 Mao Zedong’s vegetable garden in Yangjialing.
Source: © Marc Andre Matten.
the visitor by continuing Mao Zedong’s efforts: in 2018, the administrative organ of the Yangjialing site still grew the chairman’s beloved red chili pepper, turning the vegetable garden into a concrete space offering direct and visible proof that the tourist can grasp and comprehend beyond the often-repeated hollow slogans.
The ideal of self-reliance is also visible in the setup of the offices and living quarters of the leading party officials in Yan’an in the 1940s. These are either cave dwellings dug into the loess hills or brick buildings characterized by a high degree of austerity in furniture and equipment.
Eavesdropping on the comments of Chinese tourists, I heard that they deemed these places at all three historical sites in Yan’an—Yangjialing, Zaoyuan, and Wangjiaping— to be genuine and authentic, despite being visibly renovated buildings (see Figure 7.3). This was not due to the concrete materiality in front of them but because the caves perfectly embody lessons of the past and conform to the moral ideal the CCP is currently propagating as a counterforce against excessive wealth and corruption. In Zaoyuan, the cave of the general and Red Army leader Zhu De (1886-1976) is home to the replica of a sofa that, according to the tour guide, had been a present for his 60th birthday and allegedly never left him after that. Today, the original sofa is in Beijing, where Zhu died in 1976. This fact, however, does not diminish the replica’s
Figure 7.3 Cave Dwellings of Wang Jiaxiang (left) and Zhu De (right) in the Date Garden (Zaoyuan). All caves at the sites of red tourism in Yan’an have been renovated recently.
Source: © Marc Andre Matten.
historical significance. According to Ann Anagnost, “in the discourse of historical materialism as spoken by the post-Maoist state, history itself becomes the fetishized object” (1994, p. 150). Presenting material replicas as historical evidence of the CCP’s sacrifices during the Yan’an period without providing details on the objects’ biography is a central strategy in the narrative of tourist guides, who point to the exemplary character of the objects instead of insisting on their authenticity. I observed similar statements when listening to two guides from different travel agencies in the same cave.
The same applies to Yan’an as a cultural resource. In Zaoyuan, for instance, one cave was full of books that were not Mao Zedong’s (as one might expect given the image of the chairman as a well-educated scholar said to have been a voracious reader)6 but rather belonged to Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969), then the political commissar of the New Fourth Army.
The explanation on the wall showed a saying ascribed to Mao: “If I don’t read for three days, I can no longer catch up with comrade Liu.” The significance of familiarity with the traditional canon of Chinese history and literature is also highlighted in the cave of Zhang Wentian (1900-1976), then the general secretary of the CCP central committee (1935-1943) and headReenacting the Revolution 133 of the propaganda department (1931-1934, 1937-1945). During my visit to the three sites, I discovered that almost all the caves of the CCP leaders were fitted with bookshelves. Zhang’s bookshelves included recent editions of Zhuangzi, Mengzi, the Analects of Confucius, and other classical texts that were kept behind glass and served as mere signifiers. Journals and magazines that were available in Yan’an during the 1930s and 1940s, by contrast, were accessible to the visitor, showing the covers of periodicals such as World Knowledge (Shijie zhishi The Masses (QunzhongThe Fight (Zhandou ⅛⅜∙⅛), or The Call of the Motherland (Zuguo husheng ⅛,∣M^^). These reproductions were, however, without content: only photocopies of the covers were provided, while the inside pages remained empty. Preferring cover over content in this context does not indicate the absence of any political message but rather a careful step to shape the image of the past by avoiding the reproduction of the brutal and inhumane language of the revolution that had been characteristic in texts demanding reckless class struggle (Wang, 2011). Today, such struggles have increasingly been replaced with the traditional ethics of Confucian writings emphasizing harmony over conflict and are thus meant to be forgotten.
In a similar fashion, the meeting room in the former Central Committee of the CCP General Office Building in Yangjialing, where Mao presided over the Yan’an Talks, showcases photos on the wall depicting the cultural life of peasants and soldiers in Yan’an, including local traditional art forms such as the Ansai Waist Drum Dance, stilt walking, and the Rice Sprout Song Dance.
The latter is a popular folk dance in northern China where participants dress up in colorful costumes, using dancing fans and instruments such as drums and gongs. In the 1940s, the CCP turned this local custom into a movement that helped to rally village support and was used to disseminate socialist ideas.7 Though the Mao Zedong cult is not overlooked in the reminder that the revolutionary song and anthem of the Cultural Revolution, The East is Red (Dongfanghong ^^∣T), had been composed by adapting an old Shaanxi folk love song (Mittler, 2012, pp. 100-111), any reference to the historical significance of the Yan’an Talks is missing (except for a short unsuspicious quote in the back of the room). In other words, what remains in the foreground is not the political persecution that had taken place in its aftermath (Cheek, 1984) but rather the Party’s recognition of the colorful folk culture.Such an approach has two consequences. First, the selective representation of the past reduces history’s complexity, and second, the attention of the visitor is directed to the playful reenactment of the past. For instance, I observedin Yan’anthat impersonatingMao Zedong orasoldier of thePeople’s Liberation Army is a crucial element of red tourism. Spontaneous gesticu- latory impersonations of Mao by tourists often occurred at the exact spot where the Party’s chairman had given his speeches. These are unsupervised acts whose primary motivation is to create a motive for a photograph, i.e., an important element of the tourist experience (Crawshaw and Urry, 1997).At the same time, the tourist space is transformed into a stage (Edensor, 2000) where the tourist can showcase his/her identification with Mao and the chairman’s breakthroughs in Yan’an. Red tourism research in contemporary China emphasizes the significance of such performances, arguing, for instance, that providing Red Army uniforms to tourists or encouraging them to sing revolutionary songs during their visit moves them closer to the historical past (Fang and Chen, 2007; Li, 2017).
A multisensory immersion into the sacred space of Yan’an transforms historical sites into stages where the act of amusement is considered to induce learning about the past, as Chinese publications on the significance of red tourism point out (yujiao yu le see Fu, 2005; Yan and Liu, 2006).The political message is communicated by actively inviting visitors to relive the experiences (tiyan '⅛⅛) of the past. Local tourism advertisements emphasize the eventful opportunity to taste local food and drink local rice wine deemed unique to Shaanxi, and to participate in local dances or sing revolutionary songs. I was able to observe such activities at the historical sites as well as in the downtown area. According to a recent study on the development of red tourism (Han, 2017, pp. 76-80), such strategies are an important and necessary enhancement for popularizing red memories in society. The emphasis is put on the experience of local folk culture and amusement in the sense of a more or less immediate corporeal experience (Agnew, 2004), which forms the core element of today’s red tourism, where the conscious exoticization of local cultures is seen as a strategy of diversification (Chio, 2014; Wang, 2012). While this is key to the Chinese tourism industry in general, there is no mention of the striking parallels to the ideological guidelines in the Yan’an Talks that require art and literature to take local particularities into consideration to be accepted by the people. For tourists who have grown up in the post-Mao era, the Talks themselves are no longer relevant: exoticization is more attractive than the actual reliving of the past, and a visual gaze at reconstructions of the past (as in brick-and- mortar museums) is less compelling than the sensual experience by sound, taste, and smell (Urry, 1992). As a result, although the continuous references to material scarcity in Yan’an before the founding of the People’s Republic are in stark contrast to the hedonist and consumer-oriented present, eating the coarse food of those years while residing in three- or four-star hotels built in the style of loess caves is a conscious strategy in tourism. Opposing the past to the success story of economic reforms after the Cultural Revolution seemingly generates feelings of gratitude for the historical sacrifices of the revolutionary leaders and the people of the pre-1949 era. Taking a closer look at guestbook comments at the three sites, I discovered that the word ganxie, or “thank,” was often included in the comments.
Today, such gratitude is extended to the current general secretary Xi Jinping, who spent his formative years in Liangjiahe village, which is close to Yan’an. When his family suffered political persecution during the Cultural Revolution, the 15-year-old Xi was sent to this village to work asReenacting the Revolution 135 part of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement.8 During his time in Liangjiahe—according to the narrative in popular works on Xi’s rural experiences—he was living in cave homes and shared a frugal lifestyle with farmers, helping them to develop their village by building a dam and a bio-gas plant (Liangjiahe editorial group, 2018). In recent years, the village has managed to become an important place on the national map of red tourism, where visitors can see where Xi slept, ate, and worked under modest conditions and where he joined the CCP in 1974. It perfectly represents the sacrifices Xi made for China’s future. Through this expansion of the village’s significance, not only are the sacrifices in Yan’an no longer a thing of the past but Xi Jinping is also inscribed in the narrative of Yan’an.9 Indeed, I often heard visitors of the older generation expressing their gratitude to the hardworking Party when they shared their knowledge of the past with other travelers. The fundamental role of the Party in today’s economic achievements was also key to a battle reenactment in Yan’an.